by LewisO » Fri Nov 13, 2015 7:16 pm
LewisO
Fri Nov 13, 2015 7:16 pm
For Cinema4D right? I'd suggest you go with plugin and leave the standalone away. This is an interesting topic to talk about. I am really not a fan of the standalone's UI, I find it not modern and hard to work with, you might not agree with me if you're very familiar with it. Stacking material is a very useful function in C4D unfortunately it is not supported yet, so you have to work it out with mix material. Also, lots of C4D's native special shaders are not supported.
If you do product visualization, standalone would probably be ok, but for other jobs, it heavily depends on the plugin developer.
Thanks to Aoktar's great work, I think Cinema4D's version of OR is probably one of the best, it even support the color shader and multi shader, so it is really helpful when doing some dynamic motion graphics in cinema 4d, and it also works great with xpresso, which all of these are absolutely impossible with the standalone. In the latest test version there is even an octane scatter object, which is awesome for rendering millions of instances. I barely use standalone so I can't tell if there is any function that's missing from C4D, probably, but most of the time it's enough for me to do my job. And, one really important feature missing for me in supporting Cinema4D, is the vertex map shader, Aoktar said that it would probably be added in V3.
Some other problems, the rounding edge feature can't work with either of them, broken all the time.
For the node editor, it is very easy to understand and need no tuts if you have any experience working with other node-based tool (3ds Max's slate editor, xpresso etc). Try it a few times and you have no problem with it (although you can't link from the rightside/input port to the leftside/output port, which I've complained abt 4 a few times and no impr. maybe it is not a very urgent feature in the roadmap).